CLEVELAND, Ohio — The women were crackheads who gave their addictions priority over their children, Anthony Sowell explained. They required punishment, and Sowell said he took it upon himself to carry it out.

Several hours into a rigorous police interrogation on Halloween night 2009, the suspected serial killer came perhaps as close as he ever will to confessing to Cleveland Detectives Lem Griffin and Melvin Smith.

“Did you strangle these girls?” Griffin asked Sowell. “Is that what you did to them?"

“That’s what I did,” Sowell responded quietly. “I think with just my hands. But that’s all I can tell you. I don’t remember using nothing, but maybe I did.”

Jurors in Sowell’s capital murder trial spent most of Friday in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court watching about three more hours of the videotaped interrogation.

View full sizePDAnthony Sowell, right, and lawyer John Parker watch Sowell's videotaped interview with police during his trial Friday.

Sowell, 51, is charged with multiple counts of aggravated murder, kidnapping and abuse of a corpse in the deaths of 11 women whose remains were found in and around his Imperial Avenue home in 2009. He also is accused of attacking several others who survived. His trial began June 6, and he faces the death penalty if convicted.

At the time of Sowell’s arrest, police had discovered six of the bodies - one buried under a mound of dirt beneath the basement stairs, one in a shallow grave in the backyard and four in the living room of the third floor, where Sowell lived.

Sowell, throughout most of the interrogation, clung to a defense that his violent encounters with the women were surreal, nightmarish episodes after which he remembered almost nothing.

He recalled meeting some of the women and admitted to having sex with all of them. But then, something about their lifestyles would remind him of his ex-girlfriend, Lori Frazier, who he said was addicted to crack and abandoned him after he helped her clean up her life.

The resemblance would ignite a rage, and whatever happened next was a blur, he said. He knows only that the voice in his head instructed him sometime around March of that year to keep the living-room door locked, he told the detectives.

But Griffin and Smith told Sowell that even if he had blacked out or was in a dream state while strangling the women, it would have been impossible for him to remain oblivious to the bodies.

Someone had gone to great lengths to wrap them in plastic and haul dirt to crawl spaces in the basement and third floor, they pointed out. And clothes had been piled in front of the living room door to stifle the stench emanating from beneath, Griffin theorized.

“There’s no way you didn’t know about the bodies,” Griffin said. “With six, you couldn’t have forgotten about killing them all. The dream ends as soon as you put that damn dirt on top of that damn body.”

Numerous times during the interrogation, the detectives reminded Sowell of his rights to remain silent and to request a lawyer. Smith once told Sowell that a lawyer probably would advise him not to talk to the detectives in the future.

Smith tried to appeal to Sowell’s humanity, imploring him for details about the women - where he met them, what they looked like and whether he knew their names.

Sowell seemed strained to remember. He often leaned forward in his chair, resting his elbows on his knees, then would spring to an upright position when a detail occurred to him. He threw out vague memories of women’s clothing - fancy jeans, a light blue jacket. He remembered a few names, too.

One woman found in the house was named Pam, he said with certainty, pointing to Griffin’s hand-sketched blueprint of the property. Chillingly, Pam was not among the bodies police recovered.

Sowell insisted he was trying his best to help identify the women. But the detectives grew frustrated, sensing his cooperation had waned.

“You’re just trying to save your own ass,” Smith yelled.

“How can I save my ass?” Sowell shouted back. “My life is over with.”

The trial continues Monday.

Get the latest from Plain Dealer reporter Stan Donaldson at the courthouse on Twitter @pdsowelltrial.